


Letters

by Churbooseanon



Series: Starlight Challenges [5]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 19:18:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3422594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sends letters every week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters

**Author's Note:**

> Starlight Challenge Prompt for February 16th: Satisfaction is impossible. Love is too, except for the stubborn ones. In this world? Those are few. 
> 
> Added to this is Marlene on the Wall by Suzanne Vega

He sends her letters every week. Allison lays on her bunk or walks around the edge of camp or she squats behind a bit of cover while they wait to advance and she glances over his letters. One every week, slowly but surely filling a back pocket that was hard to reach on her utility belt, and she probably should have used it to carry extra clips or MREs or something, but instead each week a new set of papers. 

_Ally,_

_Work has been a strain lately. I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle it. Finding time to work on my research and still be free in time to pick Charlotte up from school, help her with her homework, and do things like shopping. Phylls, the department secretary, has taken pity on me and makes sure to stop in to my office half an hour before anything I need to so I have never been late. I’m going to see if I can’t justify having her as a full time assistant to manage my schedule and help me run errands._

_Charlotte makes me read the story about soldiers saving the princess every night. She keeps asking when you’re coming home. She misses her mom._

_-Leonard_

Truth be told they’re too much. A letter every week is more than most people get, and by the time they get to her on the lines the letters are months old. But she is still hungry for news, for that moment of connection. There has to be something she’s fighting for. 

_Ally,_

_Charlotte got in a fight with a kid at school. I don’t know why, she won’t tell me and the principal didn’t know, but she cracked a tooth. Truth be told it took me a few hours to figure out where you kept the information on her dentist and everything, but I found it. She has a temporary repair but he says she’s young enough that she’ll just lose it and have it replaced by an adult tooth later._

_At the same time we did a check-up for me. I am, of course, in near perfect health. Except for a cavity. I blame how sweet our little girl is._

_-Leonard_

She smiles whenever she has a word about her daughter. The very thought of Charlotte was what made her smile. A perfect little girl who loved fighting movies and princess dresses and reading long books. Charlotte her perfect little angel who was what she was fighting for. Leonard, though…

_Ally,_

_I wish you could have the time to write back. Charlotte has watched that video of you maybe a hundred times. I play her all the old videos of us together. I’m worried she’s forgetting your voice._

_I know I am._

_-Leonard_

They stay in her pocket always. Through fight fights and drills. When she’s on guard duty and when she’s on break. When she runs and slides into cover she can feel the weight of them behind her, like a supportive hand on her back guiding her on. At night she can see his handwriting burned onto the backs of her eyelids. Some nights while she rereads all she can do is think about the people she used to know and isn’t sure she’ll ever see again. 

_Ally,_

_Sent Charlotte off to summer camp. It means I’m alone in the house now. It’s so empty without your voices. Most of the rooms are dark because Charlotte isn’t around to forget to turn off lights. There’s never any music, never any laughter._

_How do I do this for two weeks? How do I live without you both? How do I live alone? Seems like I never learned._

_When are you coming home?_

_-Leonard_

There are things she doesn’t think about. 

The way he used to kiss her, lips light and questioning before she pressed in and demanded more of him. Staying up late at night in his arms as he read and her head just rested against his chest. An afternoon where they went out into a field filled with blue bonnets and took the most cliched family pictures. The way Charlotte laughs and the smell of his coffee and chiding him in his office for staying up too late on an experiment. 

All of those things are what she’s fighting for. What she lives for. 

What she dies for. 

_Ally,_

_There was a windstorm last night. Luckily it didn’t hit the camp where Charlotte is, but here… I left a door open by accident. It knocked the photo of you in uniform off of the mantel. The glass broke and cut up the picture. I’ll get a new one printed, but I’d rather have a truly new image of you._

_Instead I send along a picture of Charlotte covered in finger paint._

_I love you._

_-Leonard_

And when the letters come back to him, some unopened and all of them tied up with a ribbon, presented to him by one of the survivors of her unit who grabbed them with her dog tags to give to her husband, all Leonard can do is scream.


End file.
